Kesha released the official Backstabber video on October 27, 2026, sixteen years after she filmed it in Los Angeles. The Kesha Backstabber video was shot in 2009 as a homemade pitch for a single that never came, and its first authorised premiere closes one of the longest open loops in her catalogue.
Backstabber sits on Animal, the debut album Kesha released in January 2010 alongside Tik Tok, Your Love Is My Drug and Take It Off. She always intended the song to be a single. When no video was commissioned, she made one herself, and the footage then stayed unreleased while the album turned her into one of the biggest pop stars in the world. The clip leaked online in the years that followed, but this week marks the first official premiere of the original production, directed by Syndrome and filmed in September 2009.
How the Kesha Backstabber video was made
Kesha told the story herself on Instagram ahead of the premiere. In 2009 she decided the song deserved its moment, so she gathered her closest friends, stayed up all night, did their own glam and shot the video across Echo Park and Silver Lake, near the downtown Los Angeles bar where she was working part time. Everyone on screen is a real friend, and the wardrobe was improvised on the spot, with materials including trash bags worked into outfits. Reporting on the release notes her jacket in the clip was her first attempt at making a piece of clothing from that material, which the finished video wears proudly.
It was so authentic to that moment in my life, before everything changed. It was my first music video, and I just knew I needed it to work.
That context is what makes the footage land. Within a year of the shoot she had gone from regular nights at the bar she namechecks in her post to touring the world behind a number one album. The video is a document of the exact moment before that happened, made by someone with no budget, no crew structure and complete confidence that the song was worth the effort.
Sixteen years in the vault
Asked on X why the release took so long, Kesha kept the answer short, calling it a long story and adding that she had been trying the whole time. The song itself never disappeared in the meantime. Backstabber kept circulating online, found a second life on TikTok, and has returned to her recent live sets, reconnecting the Animal era favourite with the audiences who sing it back now. The official video gives that long afterlife a proper visual anchor at last.
The premiere also comes with a physical piece for collectors. A knife shaped seven inch vinyl, pressed in fiery red and black, pairs Backstabber on side A with Cannibal on side B, two of the sharpest tracks from the period that built her early catalogue. It is available through Vertigo Vinyl, and it frames the release as more than a streaming footnote, a deliberate piece of the Animal story finished properly.
The album it came from
Animal deserves its share of the frame here. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in January 2010 and turned a featured credit on Flo Rida Right Round into a solo career almost overnight. Tik Tok became one of the defining pop singles of its era, and the album run set up a career that now counts two number one albums in the United States, with Animal joined by Rainbow in 2017, plus ten top ten singles and three Hot 100 number ones. Backstabber was recorded inside that first rush, which is why the video energy feels so unfiltered. It is the sound and the look of an artist who had not yet been polished by the machinery she was about to enter.
That is also why fans kept asking for the footage. Album cuts with no single push usually fade into the catalogue, but Backstabber built its own following through live shows and online circulation, and the leaked version of the video only sharpened the demand for an official one. The premiere answers a request that has been open since the start of her career.
Why this vault release works
Archive releases can feel like leftovers, but this one plays like a missing chapter. Kesha has kept video at the centre of her recent work, sharing the ORIGAMI! clip in May, co directed with Brett Loudermilk and Zain Curtis, ahead of her North American Freedom Tour. Set beside that new material, the Backstabber video shows the same instincts at the very start, direct, funny, homemade and completely committed. Sixteen years late is still on time when the footage is this honest, and for anyone who came in with Animal, the Kesha Backstabber video is essential viewing.
